Qualla: Isanapura https://qualla.com/isanapura en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:39:17 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Isanapura https://qualla.com/isanapura Isanapura: Introduction https://qualla.com/isanapura/ Around 636, Chinese court scholars finished compiling the Book of Sui and left inside it a handful of lines about a city on the middle Mekong: an urban quarter in the west, temple precincts off to the east, and somewhere at the centre a great hall. For thirteen centuries that hall was a sentence and nothing more. Then archaeologists working the flat scrub of Kampong Thom Province in Cambodia put a trench into the middle of a grid they had first traced from the air, and struck a terrace of laterite and brick running seventy metres north to south. The city in the Chinese text has a Sanskrit name as well. Isanapura - the place of Isana.

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/9/isanapura-wp/w669-isanapura-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Isanapura: The King Who Wrote Himself Into the Map https://qualla.com/isanapura/ Isana is one of Shiva's names, and the king who founded this capital had already built it into his own: Isanavarman, protected by Isana. He ruled from roughly 616 to 637 over the polity Chinese sources call Chenla, and he established his city here around 618. Almost immediately h...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/9/isanapura-wp/w669-isanapura-the-king-who-wrote-himself-into-the-map.mp3 0:06 2 full Isanapura: Chenla Is a Chinese Word https://qualla.com/isanapura/ Here is the awkward thing about every sentence written on this subject. Chenla - Zhenla in Mandarin - appears in Chinese dynastic records and nowhere in Old Khmer. No local inscription uses it. The same is true of Funan, the older Mekong polity that Chenla is said to have absorbe...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/9/isanapura-wp/w669-isanapura-chenla-is-a-chinese-word.mp3 0:06 3 full Isanapura: The Grid Under the Scrub https://qualla.com/isanapura/ What stands above ground here is temple. What lies below it is city, and only recently has anyone been able to make out the shape. LiDAR flown over the site resolved a four-by-four grid - planned, deliberate, not an organic sprawl. A moat roughly two kilometres long wraps the wes...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/9/isanapura-wp/w669-isanapura-the-grid-under-the-scrub.mp3 0:06 4 full Isanapura: Twenty-Three Stones, and an Argument https://qualla.com/isanapura/ European identification of the capital came slowly. A first study was made in 1912; then in 1927 Henri Parmentier surveyed it for the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient and became the first to treat the ruins as a city rather than a scatter of shrines. Twenty-three inscriptions hav...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/9/isanapura-wp/w669-isanapura-twenty-three-stones-and-an-argument.mp3 0:06 5 full Isanapura: What Came After https://qualla.com/isanapura/ The last king of consequence here was Jayavarman I, who ruled roughly from 657 to 681 and whose inscriptions show a reach well beyond the Stung Sen basin. His death broke it apart. The eighth century in Cambodia is a fog of small competing centres, and the fog does not lift until...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/6/6/9/isanapura-wp/w669-isanapura-what-came-after.mp3 0:06 6 full